Joel Dinda's photos with the keyword: 71stevac

When I arrived in Pleiku, about half the buildings in the hospital complex had been abandoned, and most of the others housed the officers and staff of the 146th Signal Company. The abandoned buildings had mostly been dwellings, near as we could tell, but they'd already been stripped of everything easily taken. Over the course of my year, we took away a good share of what was left--plywood walls, for the most part--and used that to build flimsy "rooms" in what had been the hospital's wards. Never were the abandoned buildings pretty. This place was pretty typical. Pleiku, Republic of Vietnam, 1971.

Pleiku, Republic of Vietnam, 1971. Back "behind" the hospital proper, there were a bunch of abandoned buildings which had presumably housed the medical staff when the 71st Evacuation Hospital was a large operation. We scavenged them, and rebuilt the interior of the large wards we inhabited into what amounted to a sheltered village of plywood shacks.

I really like this photo. But it demonstrates how much I've forgotten. This is the Pleiku Hospital (the 71st Evac, properly), viewed from the end center of the complex. I suspect that's the NCO club in the foreground, but somehow I've lost all reliable memories of--well, lots of stuff. Or perhaps it's the dining hall. I'm really not sure. [Edit 1/26/11:] That's the dining hall in the foreground. [Reorientation courtesy of this photo on Steve Streeper's website .] I am sure, however, that Tropo Hill is out of the picture to the right, and the Pleiku Airbase is out of the picture to the left. Nice clouds. Pleiku often had great clouds. It's where I started watching the sky. Shot with my Minolta SR-T 101. 1971.

Where I lived in Vietnam: Ward 1 of the 71st Evacuation Hospital, in Pleiku. By 1971 the 71st was but a pale ghost of itself, and most of the hospital complex had been either ceded to the local Signal Corps folks (that would include me) or completely abandoned. So I spent my Vietnam year living in a hospital ward. This was the social area, between the wards. If I'm not totally disoriented, the building to the left was the latrine (better than the word implies, but...) and that on the right was Ward 1. Beyond the fences, and up the hill, you can see a corner of one of the large tropospheric antennas which apparently mean Pleiku to everyone who was stationed in the Central Highlands. Camera: Minolta SR-T 101